The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future
by deathcab4cutie17
Summary: Songfic. Cat is anorexic and Jade is too weak to help. Not really a story, more of an account of their feelings. I don't own the song. T for triggers.


I grabbed hold of her wrist and my hand closed from tip to tip  
I said "you've taken the diet too far, you've got to let it slip"  
But she's not eating again, she's not eating again, she's not eating again, she's not eating again.  
I ask her to speak French and then I need her to translate, I get the feeling she makes the meaning more significant.  
She was always far too pretty for me to believe in a single word she said, believe a word she said.

_Hollywood Arts didn't have a track team. There were people who claimed they ran every Saturday but let's just say the Ping Pong Scam caught on and soon every Hollywood Arts' sports team was a con. Cat had been on the cross country team in middle school—she had been the best in the district. She had great potential. She was on her way to dreamland._

_Hollywood Arts didn't have a track team._

_Cat ran every afternoon and she was _fast. _If she hadn't tripped over the loose piece of pavement, I would never have caught up to her. As it was, I was panting when I grabbed hold of her arm._

_That's when I realized how _skinny _she was. I had always had tiny hands, perfect for playing my slender antique piano. Even so, my hands encircled her wrist easily._

"_Oh, Cat," I whispered. "You've taken the diet too far; you've got to let it slip."_

_She yanked her hand away, surprisingly strong for a girl so skinny._

"_No," she said. A word so simple, so unassuming, so devastating._

"Cat." _My voice broke, sounding so fragile. I _was_ the strong one here, wasn't I? I was the one who weighed enough. I was the one who couldn't wrap my hand around my wrist._

_I was the one ravaged by love._

_The next few days—weeks? Months? Hours?—I watched her. How had I not noticed? She wasn't eating. She had never been eating. How had I not noticed?  
Ravaged by love._

_There were a few clubs left in Hollywood Arts that were for real. French Club, for instance. Cat and I had promised each other a long time ago that we would fly to France on our eighteenth birthday—we were born on the same day in the same hospital, minutes apart. Cat took French lessons so that she could converse with the natives while I nodded along. I didn't have time for French, between ballet and piano and all those other classes I couldn't remember. _

_Cat learned French, and I asked her to speak it to me._

"_Je ne mange pas, mon amour," she whispered between the sheets. "Je ne mange pas."_

"_I have no idea what you're saying; only that you're beautiful." I lied._

_Cat had this look she gave to her dad when she said she was going to a friend's house. When she was lying completely, she gave this look. Innocence given a face._

_She gave me the look._

"_It means I'm beautiful," she giggled. _

_I'd taken French for five years._

_I laughed along with her. I was ravaged by love._

_She was beautiful._

_She was sick._

_She was wrong._

_She was beautiful._

_I was ravaged by love._

_Absolutely _ravaged _by love._  
At fourteen her mother died in a routine operation, from allergic reaction to a general anesthetic. She spent the rest of her teens experimenting with prescriptions, in a futile attempt to know more than the doctors.

_Cat joined cross country because she liked running. It was what she did best. Cat was always running away, away, away._

_She had good reason. She had many things to run away from. She had these awful memories._

_When she was fourteen, her mother realized she was walking funny because she had an extra bit of bone in her foot. She decided to have surgery to get it removed. It was as safe as it could possibly be; the doctors had performed this operation hundreds of times._ _There was no reason to worry. On a Monday morning, Mrs. Valentine left the house, on a Monday night, a phone call replaced her._

"_Mr. Valentine?"_

"_Yes?"_

"_I'm afraid we have some bad news."_

"_What is it?"_

"_Your wife came in for surgery today. She had an allergic reaction to a general anesthetic."_

"_Is she alright?"_

"_I'm afraid not, sir. I'm afraid she's deceased."_

"…"

"_Mr. Valentine? Sir? Did you hear me, sir? I said your wife's deceased. She's _dead."

_Cat had heard the entire thing. The Valentines' phone was always on speaker because Mrs. Valentine didn't like secrets._

_She ran._

_Cat got pills for depression, for insomnia, for headaches, for whatever she could. She mixed them together; she took them day and night. She wanted an allergic reaction. She wanted to know how her mother felt. She wanted to know how the doctors could have saved her, because she was sure there was a way. Cat wanted to know why her mother was dead._

"_Why is my mother dead?"_

"_I don't know, sweetie."_

_Cat wanted to know._  
She said one day to leave her, sand up to her shoulders waiting for the tide  
to drag her to the ocean, to another sea's shore.

_Cat never thought she was beautiful. She knew she was skinny, but not beautiful._

_Oh, but she was._

_She loved me, and she knew I was beautiful, and she thought she didn't deserve me, and she told me to leave her._

_We went to the beach one night. A beach full of sand and water and memories, and Cat dug herself a tomb of sand. It went up her body to her shoulders, but not over her pretty little face. _

_What a little face._

_I didn't notice._

_I was ravaged by love._

"_Run away," she told me. "Leave me here, and let the tide carry me away."_

"_I could never leave you."_

"_I want to find another sea shore."_

"_I want to be with you."_

"_We'll float away together."_

_The tide didn't carry us away. It wasn't strong enough to carry away this frail girl and me._  
This thing hurts like hell.  
But what did you expect?

_I saw her starving._

_She doubled over from hunger pains sometimes, and I saw her staring at popcorn when we went to the movies. I knew better than to offer it to her, though._

_I let her suffer._

_And she so obviously suffered._

_But what did she expect?_

_Starving herself was going to make her starving. _

_What did she expect?_  
And all you can hear is the sound of your own heart  
And all you can feel is your lungs flood and the blood course  
But oh I can see five hundred years dead set ahead of me  
Five hundred behind,  
A thousand years in perfect symmetry  
_We were perfect together._

_Our lives weren't perfect by a long shot, but we were perfect. We made each other perfect. We were like two halves of a whole. Cliché, I know, but we were. Two halves of a heart, full to bursting. Bursting with blood and love._

_We're going to be together forever. This is a fact._

_Common knowledge._

_Everyone knows this._

_We will do everything together._

_We were born together._

_We will live together._

_We will die together._

_When I think of my future—our future—her future—they blend together—I can only imagine us together. 500 years from now, we will be together. 1000 years after that, we will be together._

_We will go down in history._

_We will direct the uprising._

_We will bring the columns crashing down._  
Best known left wrist right finger, through all the Southern States, on every video games machine they call her triple A.

_She was the anonymous hitchhiker, and I was the car that pulled over._  
There were racists on the radio trying to give up smoking, the chat show host, he joked "you have to wait for the government program".  
You talk about your politics, and I wonder if you could be one of them, but you could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off your tongue again.

_She never wanted the normal life—maybe because her life was so far from normal. Maybe she wanted to make the most of it. Maybe she wanted to own the abnormality._

_Whatever the reason, Cat always took the high road. The fast lane. She was outside the box. She couldn't bear the thought of a white picket fence, or two point five kids. She couldn't imagine kissing the man who begs God's forgiveness afterwards._  
A good place to look to the future is when you are sat at the sea, with the salt up to your ankles and a view of the end of the pier, you may look down at your model's feet and wish that you'd just float away, and the weather here is overcast and the sea is the same shade of grey, so the landscape before you looks just like the edge of the world, but to the left side and the right side, either way is a crazy golf course.

_We went to the beach on more than one occasion. Cat ran along the shore, and I made a sand castle for her to destroy when she returned. Cat hated everything stable. And I hated everything that wasn't her, so maybe I hated everything that wasn't stable, too. Either way I didn't mind when she kicked my castle, killing everyone inside along with all their stable hopes and dreams._

_Cat liked to strip down and watch her reflection ripple in the water. Usually the water was grey because we only came to the beach at night and when it was cloudy, to be sure no one was there. Cat would watch herself morph into something ugly and then beautiful and then ugly and then beautiful again. _

_When she looked in front, she would see endlessness. Our endless futures._

_When she looked to the side, she saw a twisting maze, and I could see how she almost wanted to brave it._

_Almost._

_But she was too weak on her own, with her skin-and-bones body. Maybe if she brought me along…_

_But wouldn't that defeat the point?_

_She wanted to head towards the maze because it would be a change._

_If she brought me, no change would occur._

_I was too stable for her liking._

_She loved me anyway._

_I don't know why._

_I loved her, too._

_I didn't know the reason for that, either._

_But I knew that I did love her. And too much._

_I was unconditionally and irrevocably ravaged by love._  
The Sea is a good place to think of the future.  
_Isn't it?_  
And all you can hear is the sound of your own heart  
And all you can feel is your lungs flood and the blood course  
But oh I can see five hundred years dead set ahead of me  
Five hundred behind,  
A thousand years in perfect symmetry  
A thousand years no getting rid of me  
A thousand years in perfect symmetry.

_In a thousand years, there we would be, together. And people would stand by and venerate us._

_Or maybe all this was wishful thinking…?_

_I had been known to regard an idea to the point of adulating it._

"_Do you love me?" I asked._

_Cat gave me this look._

_Innocent._

_Childish._

_Loving._

_Cat._

_She gave me this look._

"_Of course."_

**I was feeling depressed. Again. **


End file.
